EnergyCompanies team up to develop carbon capturing

Three companies have teamed up to build a low-carbon, coal-based power plant in Scotland; the plant will include a carbon-capture and storage; with more than 90 percent carbon capture, the coal feedstock plant will generate extremely low-carbon electric power and also produce hydrogen gas for commercial use

Summit Power Group, a Seattle-based developer of low-carbon electric power projects, to other day announced it has entered into an agreement with National Grid and Petrofac to seek funding for the development of a low-carbon power plant — including full-chain, commercial-scale carbon capture and storage — in the United Kingdom. The project, to be named the Caledonia Clean Energy Project, will be submitted to the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) for funding under the U.K. Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) Delivery Competition, as recently outlined in the European Journal.

The proposed Summit power plant will be based at the Port of Grangemouth, west of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, Scotland. With more than 90 percent carbon capture, the coal feedstock plant will generate extremely low-carbon electric power and also produce hydrogen gas for commercial use. The carbon dioxide (CO2) captured will be transported via pipeline to St. Fergus by National Grid Carbon and then transferred offshore for geological sequestration deep under the North Sea by Petrofac subsidiary, CO2DeepStore.

The project site has been selected to take advantage of synergies with other facilities for industrial gas supply and to support CO2 capture. The location provides the benefit of being close to the UK North Sea for both CO2 storage and, later, enhanced oil recovery opportunities, and enables the re-use of existing pipelines.

Summit Power is currently developing a very similar project in Texas — the Texas Clean Energy Project (TCEP) – and intends to replicate many aspects of TCEP at Grangemouth. Summit Power’s TCEP project is a cutting-edge carbon capture and storage (CCS) project for the U.S. Department of Energy, which in 2010 awarded the project $450 million under the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI). CCPI is a cost-shared collaboration between the Federal government and private industry, aimed at stimulating investment in extreme low-carbon, coal-based power generation technologies through successful commercial demonstrations.